Ravi strips to his underclothes and paces the floor. It’s early April. The nights still have a chill in Dehra Dun. While walking he catches a glimpse of his slender boyish body in one of the mirrors. He looks around the dorm and remembers the community showers at boarding school. He remembers the naked bodies becoming bigger and more muscular as each week passed by; the girls lusting after those glorious torsos—Ravi, not on any sports team, at the receiving end of a series of rotten rejections.

He chooses a bunk bed and lies down on his back. He has left one light on. He observes the ornate shade, the head of the bulb peeping nervously out of its floral foreskin. Off-white moths circle endlessly, give furtive kisses, then fall to the ground and die as abruptly as they were born.

Ravi shuts his eyes. He finds the spaces under his eyelids suffused with a dusky orange twilight. Ravi hasn’t noticed yet but there is a man lying on the bunk bed above his own. He has been lying there for hours.

Now, as Ravi tosses and turns, the man raises himself, dangles his legs over the edge. Ravi can see the outlines of his legs but not the details. Even when he descends Ravi can’t see him clearly. Although the outline suggests that the man is big, the bulk of his form is filled with darkness.

Ravi, half-scared, half-excited, inspects this muscular darkness that has carved a niche for itself in the homogeneous orange light. The man walks towards Ravi, naked except for a pair of boots. ‘This cannot be an apparition,’ Ravi, now sitting upright, tells himself, ‘aren’t apparitions supposed to be soundless?’

The man barks an order, ‘Strip and lie face down on the bed. Do not move.’ He has a deep bass voice, like a low growl. It exudes authority, certainty; it’s a voice that is used to being listened to and obeyed.

Ravi has no choice. He can feel his free will dissipate. He does as he is told.

The man sits astride Ravi’s buttocks and straps his wrists and ankles to the corners of the bed. Ravi can sense the weight and touch of his naked buttocks on his own. He can also sense a temperature difference—his is icy cold while the man’s seem to burn with an unnatural heat.

The man lies on top of him crushing him under his weight. Ravi can feel his matchstick arms and legs dissolve, merge into the pillars the giant has for limbs; he feels the man’s heavy breath on his neck, his stubble against his ears, his broad hairy chest tickling his back.

The apparition grinds his hips slowly, tightly, all the while pressing into Ravi’s buttocks. He doesn’t enter but shafts his swollen cock up and down the downy crevice between Ravi’s flat cheeks.